Fundamentalist

Southern Baptists will go back to the future when they begin their national convention in Houston tomorrow.Fourteen years ago in Houston, the Baptists began a "holy war" that divided the nation's largest Protestant group into fundamentalist and moderate camps.The fundamentalists stunned moderates at the 1979 gathering when the Rev. Adrian Rogers of Memphis, Tenn., won the presidency from moderate candidates, who had had a hammerlock on leadership for more than a decade.It was the beginning of a series of fundamentalist victories that have left that faction in sole control of the 15.5 million-member national convention.

Enormous pressure has been placed on al-Qaida since the fall of 2001. Our Afghan invasion cost it heavily, but more important, through our relationships with cooperative foreign intelligence services, we have been able to put al-Qaida under relentless pressure. Many of its top people have been killed or captured. Its communications and finances have been identified, monitored and disrupted, and its target countries have greatly increased their terrorist countermeasures. All of these things have weakened the terrorists and strengthened us and our friends.

ALGIERS, Algeria -- A party that says it wants to turn Algeria into an Islamic republic in the Iranian mold has triumphed in the nation's first free parliamentary elections, trouncing the ruling National Liberation Front, which has governed the country since independence 30 years ago.Government officials said that virtually complete returns from Thursday's voting had delivered 189 of the Algerian Parliament's 430 seats to the Islamic Salvation Front, a...

THE SIMILARITIES among the radical wings of religious fundamentalism are striking and frightening. In Iran, for example, the mullahs issue fatwas, the exhortations to assassinate people they don't like. The most notorious of these in recent times was the fatwa issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against the Indian-born author Salman Rushdie. The ayatollah was incensed because Mr. Rushdie's novel Satanic Verses seemed to insult Islam. We have our own religious nuts here in America.

PARIS -- After years of tolerating the unrestrained growth of militant fundamentalist practices, the Saudi Arabian government has adopted a series of measures signaling its readiness to crack down on Muslim dissidents accused of using religion to further their political aims.Citing the "dictates of the public interest," the Saudi government announced the dismissal yesterday of four militant Muslim scholars from universities and ordered the closure of two fundamentalist lawyers' offices.The six fundamentalist figures had announced 10 days ago the creation of what they described as Saudi Arabia's first human rights committee.

CAIRO, Egypt -- After a weekend of worsening violence that has left up to 40 people dead, Algeria's military-backed government declared a 12-month state of emergency yesterday and moved to ban the Islamic fundamentalist political party.The move appeared designed to head off large-scale public demonstrations threatened by the 3-year-old Islamic Salvation Front, which has demanded the release of its leaders from prison and resumption of the electoral process under which it was poised to gain control of the National Assembly last month.

Paris -- The case of Taslima Nasreen, the Bangladesh novelist condemned by Islamic fundamentalists, demonstrates the plight of Islamic intellectuals who struggle in their own countries not only to write what they want to write but in order to establish the larger freedom to debate ideas.The Salman Rushdie case in Britain has tended to obscure rather than illuminate the problems of those Islamic writers and intellectuals who are remote from the West's promotional and publicity machine and its fashionable causes.

Paris.--The United States has Sudan on its list of outlaw states, saying that Sudan sponsors Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. France finds that a logical reason for getting on better terms with Sudan.Who better to talk with about the problem of terrorism than those in a position, if not to call it off, at least to damp it down?A number of large conclusions has been drawn from Sudan's handing over of Carlos the terrorist to French justice. The principal significance, however, is what it reveals (or confirms)

THE possibility that terrorism by Muslim fundamentalists may well have reached America's shores has already reinforced ugly stereotypes of Muslims. In reality, the vast majority of Muslims -- both in the U.S. and abroad -- not only oppose terrorism; they also reject the religious intolerance and the oppression of women practiced by some of their co-religionists.Indeed, over the past 500 years, Western countries have experienced far more warfare, instability and intolerance than has the Muslim world.

FROM HOME and abroad voices have begun to counsel America that with communism's death, the world must prepare for a new threat -- radical Islam.This threat is symbolized by the Middle Eastern Muslim fundamentalist, a Khomeini-like creature armed with a radical ideology and nuclear weapons, intent on launching a violent jihad, or holy war, against Western civilization.The image has been magnified by the trial of a group of Muslim terrorists from the Middle East in the bombing of New York's World Trade Center.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - American troops helping the Iraqi police during a raid on a mosque in Karbala yesterday morning arrested 32 supporters of a fundamentalist Shiite cleric who has openly defied the United States. The men, followers of Sheik Moktada al-Sadr, had sought refuge in the al-Mukayam mosque Oct. 14 after a gunbattle with followers of a rival cleric. "These are criminal elements," said Lt. Col. George Krivo, a spokesman for the military here. "Illegal weapons were also seized." No casualties were reported.

AMARI REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank - His face unshaven and his clothes disheveled, Khalid Idris deftly roams the back alleys here, sleeping in a different house each night to avoid the Israeli army patrols searching for him. The burly 36-year-old is a member of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the militant wing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's mainstream Fatah political party. But Idris increasingly finds himself at odds with Fatah, whose leaders have repeatedly called for an end to attacks inside Israel.

The recently retired Episcopal bishop of Newark, N.J., who begins work as a lecturer this month at Harvard University, has never backed down from a confrontation. In his 23 years as bishop, he has embraced some of the most liberal positions in theology and church doctrine. In Biblical studies, he has battled fundamentalists, and in his writings, rejected literal interpretations of doctrines like the virgin birth, physical resurrection and the Ascension. He wrote a book in which he declared St. Paul was likely gay. He was an outspoken supporter of civil rights as a young priest in the South in the 1960s, earning him the enmity of the Ku Klux Klan.

Drawing on the deep resources of "creation science" advocacy groups, American fundamentalists are arming themselves with the latest books challenging details of Darwinian theory, getting elected to majority positions on school boards and learning ways to word curricula so that creationism and evolution get equal respect.While they have gotten very good at making a case for teaching alternative theories, a small group of scientists and educators stands in their way.Most of America's children are not being taught that the world might have come into existence only 10,000 years ago, vs. the nearly 4.5 billion years advocated by scientists, and this is largely because of the SWAT-like efforts of the National Center for Science Education.

Here is what Karen Hartman says when people ask what her play "Gum" is about: "I usually say it's about a fictional country where there's a ban on gum and one sister has chewed the gum and is a fallen woman, and the other sister wants to know what's so exciting about the gum, and that's where it begins."Where the play goes from there will no doubt surprise many audience members. It even surprised the playwright. "I was halfway through a play about female genital mutilation when I realized that was the play I was writing," Hartman says.

WASHINGTON -- The Democratic Party suffered serious defections in both the 1984 and 1988 presidential elections because of the perception that Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis had made too many concessions to Jesse Jackson.The perception wasn't accurate but that was beside the point. The operative thing was that many middleclass white voters -- these were the "Reagan Democrats" -- believed the black civil rights leader enjoyed too much influence on their party.These days, the Republican Party is in precisely the same position in dealing with leaders of the religious right.

THERE is an old and wise rule of thumb about Arab-Israeli relations. If they seem to be getting better, just wait a while and they'll almost always get worse.Yet in the current round of talks in Washington, Israelis and Palestinians are actually making progress for the first time. And while Syrians and Israelis haven't gone forward, they haven't gone backward either.Two words explain this fragile and unlikely state of affairs: Islamic fundamentalism.Where war and the threat of war have failed to overcome mutual Arab-Israeli hatreds, fundamentalist fanatics have made peace look almost appetizing.

Enormous pressure has been placed on al-Qaida since the fall of 2001. Our Afghan invasion cost it heavily, but more important, through our relationships with cooperative foreign intelligence services, we have been able to put al-Qaida under relentless pressure. Many of its top people have been killed or captured. Its communications and finances have been identified, monitored and disrupted, and its target countries have greatly increased their terrorist countermeasures. All of these things have weakened the terrorists and strengthened us and our friends.

IN THE BEGINNING, Christians who believed in a literal translation of the Bible put their faith in the words of Genesis, certain that God created the heavens and the Earth, that the Earth was without form and that darkness was upon the face of the land.And then there was light.But then there was science.In 1925, orator, political leader and prosecutor William Jennings Bryan fought the rising flood of modern science in the celebrated trial of high school biology teacher John Scopes, who awed his students with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

CAIRO, Egypt -- In Raffik Sabban's version of "Romeo and Juliet," an Egyptian boy meets an Israeli girl. They fall in love. His brother dies at the hands of the Israeli army. His family objects to the courtship, and, well, you know how the story ends.But when Sabban presented the movie script to the government censors, they raised 26 objections, including the choice of the heroine's name, Sara. Sabban says if he agreed to the censors' changes, "the film would not be a film -- it would be a farce."